Dynamic Analysis: Sail the Ship Before It's Built

A combatant ship is a complex system that involves the integration of many subsystems and components. Everyone agrees that systems integration is essential; nevertheless, the ability to deal with it is viewed as being elementary at one end of the spectrum to overly complex at the other end. Past emphasis has been on the development of the necessary tools and organizations needed to produce components that can be used to configure systems. As a consequence, when dealing with systems integration, the focus is primarily on what the system is and how its components fit, rather than what it does. Computer technology is benefiting the marine industry in many ways. Although it has been used to progressively improve the capability to deal with the component issues related to systems integration, the marine industry has yet to recognize the merits of effectively using the technology to address system functionality issues. This paper elaborates on the difficulty in dealing with system functionality and describes a way in which computer based simulation of propulsion machinery systems can be used to deal with the functionality aspects of systems integration. When procuring a ship, propulsion system simulation permits us to “sail it before we build it.”